Grandpa Neil has a Song for You

Some curmudgeons one just can't compete with. Neil Young's new album is full of songs about hybrid cars and revenue streams and hedge funds, but the title cut, "Fork in the Road", is one of his funniest ever. Go watch the video about blogging in the dark and repossessing your flat-panel TV and "bailout coming but it's not for me" and "support the troops in the fuckin war whose idea was that?" etc, etc. Video is here.

"In my day, we had cinnamon girls and gold rushes and spliffs as big as your arm. Not like this 21st century shit." Long may you run, old man.

The Hazards of Love and Rock Operas

It was one of those classic mysterioso moments, where I bounced betwixt Target and BestBuy at lunch on Wednesday to see if someone would sell me a copy of The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love for less than $10 (hey, it's a barter economy). I tuned in to the local NPR station, KRCC, and they were playing a recorded live set from SXSW of The Decemberists playing their new rock opera in its entirety. Time to make some real-time comparisons.

The moniker "rock opera" makes me nervous, since it tended to meander into ostentiatiousness in the 1970s. We already had a sillier rock-opera offering in 2009, with Benjy Ferree's overlooked Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee. The Decemberists have sauntered close to the format, with looser conceptual song-cycles (The Crane Wife) and overextended single-song storytelling (The Tain). But this new one is one of those prelude and reprise and munchkin-orchestra summits, just the thing to make me nervous.

First of all, Harvard Courant, this isn't nearly as close to Jethro Tull as it is to a cross between The Who's Quadrophenia and Neil Young's Greendale. Tull, in both Passion Play and Thick As a Brick, developed operatic mixed-tempo song structures that were closer to some of Todd Rundgren's wilder efforts, usually with a single narrator telling an apocalyptic tale. Colin Meloy gives us assigned characters and parts, reaching to external vocalists Becky Stark and Shara Worden. The reliance on established characters works best when there are dueling tempos, as in 'The Wanting Comes in Waves,' when the structure sounds most like Quadrophenia.

But let's be honest. A Victorian-era tale of a love quadrangle involving woodland sprites and unwanted pregnancies doesn't grab me. When The Decemberists stay looser but brilliant, as in the aforementioned Crane Wife or Picaresque, it holds my interest better. Rest assured, even the apparently dumb moments of this work, like the female chorus of 'Hazards of Love Part 3,' will stick to your synapses even if you demand otherwise. But it revisits the old Tull/Who question: Does the world need more rock operas? (Nevertheless, it's bound to be in Top Ten for 2009.)

Neil Out-Curmudgeons Us All, Again

Ahh, Neil Young, shape-shifting through the 1980s and 90s fast enough to give us whiplash, then giving us Greendale and Living With War in rapid succession in the 21st century. He's a constant role model for modern curmudgeonry. The New York Times now tells us he's offering a film documentary of the 2006 Crosby Stills Nash & Young tour, called CSNY: Deja Vu. He went the distance, hiring former war correspondent Mike Cerre to be "embedded" with the tour, and badgering his bandmates to center on the antiwar songs he'd recently completed ("benevolent dictator," said Graham Nash). Young also seemed to sport a certain glee, Dixie-Chicks-style, when the audience offered middle fingers and obscene words for the antiwar songs. Really, what did these people expect? Graham, after all, is touring this year with a revamped "Chicago" that asks people to "please come to Denver, show your face." Young is spurring his other aging CSNY pals to be constant reminders of the dark side of American life, and we should relish that he will apparently remain a contrarian to his last breath.